Once More, It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again

If you haven’t yet seen the latest Ken Burns documentary, find the time. It’s powerful, poignant, haunting and urgently relevant to the present moment. Its urgent relevance to the here and now makes it all the more important to experience, for a truly great nation is one that can acknowledge—and learn from—its failures.

I learned a great deal watching the three-part series, which made me wonder why I never learned those things in school and caused me to reflect on untold parts of the local history of my childhood stomping grounds.

Wisconsin has been my home for all but two years of my life. I did most of my growing up in rural Clark County, about halfway between Eau Claire and Wausau. I rode the bus from my family’s dairy farm to school in Owen. I reached my fifties before learning about sundown towns and discovering that Owen is suspected to have been one. Little towns nearby—Abbotsford, Loyal, Greenwood, Thorp, Stanley, Medford, Neillsville—were thought to be sundown towns at one poin…